About a decade ago, Cindy Gallop, a pixie-like businesswoman, said she began dating and sleeping with men about half her age. While their stamina and her experience made a good combination, Gallop said, she also discerned a disturbing trend: The boudoir moves of many of her young lovers seemed drawn entirely from pornography.

So Gallop, now 52, an advertising executive turned web entrepreneur, took her findings to a TED conference in 2009. Easy access to sex websites, she told them, is teaching younger generations “that what you see in hard-core pornography is the way that you have sex.”

“As a mature, experienced, confident, older woman,” she added, “I have no problem realizing that a certain amount of re-education, rehabilitation and reorientation has to take place.”

As laughter rippled through the discomfited and rapt audience, Gallop unveiled a website,

www.MakeLoveNotPorn.com, that compares what it calls the “porn world” with the “real world” of sex.

As graphic and funny as some of the language was, the site was mostly text. Now, Gallop is taking it up a notch with www.MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, a kind of YouTube for the erotically unabashed. The site, just a few weeks old and still in beta, consists entirely of videos uploaded by real people having what might be called non-performance-like sex.

Payment is simple: Contributors pay $5 to post a video, users pay $5 to watch and 50 per cent of the proceeds go to the contributors. Each submission is vetted by Gallop and her team. There are now 13 videos. Compared with the harsh lens of mainstream pornography, the videos come across as sweet, earnest, languid, playful and deeply human.

In one video, a hip young thing throws her panties at a bespectacled bearded man and, in a flurry of giggles and moans, nudity and in flagrante delicto ensue.

In another, Lily LaBeau and Danny Wylde, pornographic actors who are a couple in real life, partake in a slow-building coupling, showing how they have sex outside of work.

Gallop said 19,000 users have signed up for invitations, with half the page views coming from countries like China, Iraq and Afghanistan. Gizmodo, a gadget blog, called it “The NSFW Social Media and Content-Sharing Platform the Internet’s Been Waiting for.”

“It’s not about performing for the camera,” Gallop said. “We’re looking for the comical, the messy, the ridiculous. We’re looking for the real.”

Getting financing for MakeLoveNotPorn.tv has not been easy, but Gallop said she was compelled by the feedback she got from the original site. Women in particular believed that they were trapped in someone else’s pornographic fantasy in bed.

“If I want to tackle the impact of porn as default sex educator,” she said, “I have to come up with something as appealing to the mainstream and as all-pervasive in our society as porn.”

Despite her strident views, Gallop said she did not set out to become a sex evangelist. Born to a Chinese mother and British father, she was raised in Borneo (“a great deal more boring than it sounds,” she said) and studied English at Oxford. After college, she went into advertising and joined the firm Bartle Bogle Hegarty in London, where she quickly scaled the ranks. She moved to New York in 1998 to start up its U.S. office.

She stood out, helped to no small degree by her wardrobe. Gallop favours black leather and tight dresses, drawing inspiration from characters like Lisbeth Salander of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Molly Millions of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer.

“You could not miss her in the industry: She was distinct and different, a real character,” said William Charnock, a longtime friend and the chief strategy officer for R/GA, an interactive digital ad agency. “She’d be wearing leather bustiers to events.”

She also lives in an extraordinary home. Her cavernous 3,800-square-foot “black apartment” in Chelsea in Manhattan was carved out of a former YMCA and looks like a Blade Runner set reimagined by Carrie Bradshaw. Spotlit and filled with paintings, animal prints, Gucci stilettos and Chinese lacquer, it has been featured in an episode of Law and Order: SVU, a music video with P. Diddy and Nelly and, of course, the multiple beddings that eventually led to MakeLoveNotPorn.tv.

Her entrance into cougardom came through work. Her advertising firm was pitching an online dating site and, wanting to fully experience the product, Gallop, then in her early 40s, posted a profile. To her surprise and delight, she said, the majority of responses came from younger men. Gallop has barely glanced back since.

“I realized I was an attractive older woman who never wanted to settle down,” she said. “I had a high-flying career. Never wanted to get married. All I wanted to do was have some fun. And a bunch of guys went, ‘Whoopee!’ ”

At first, she revelled in her sexual discovery. In 2008, she gave a talk at TED university titled The Toyboy Manifesto: Why Older Woman Plus Younger Man Is the Relationship Model of the Future, in which she argued that such pairings, while generally deemed socially unacceptable, were not only sexually ideal but also righted gender imbalances. Young men, she said, found her life experience appealing rather than threatening.

But when she saw that many of the young men had little sex education outside of pornography, she was moved to speak out.

“The issue I’m tackling is not porn,” she said. “It’s the complete lack of open, healthy dialogue around porn and sex.”

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